Springsteens Pickups

did he have the petillo pickups since he first got his esquire? cuase the born to run cover it shows him using the staggered magnet pickups, then the darkness era he had the flat pole pickups. but was it phils pups the whole time? please comment!

As far as I know he's always used Petillo pickups. The Esquire had some sort of stereo output configuration when Phil Petillo bought it (it had a middle pickup if I remember correctly, going to a separate jack that was filled in - you can still see the filled-in hole in some pictures) so I'd say Petillo probably gutted the entire thing and started afresh. The staggered/flat-pole might just be different versions of Phil's pickups.

I might be wrong there, but it's my best guess for the difference.

Petillo pups the whole time. But they went through a bunch of different variations. Preamps came much later, either during river or born in the USA tours. Petillo got more and more into experimenting with diffent magnets, wirings, etc as they went, and as Bruce kept looking for more and more output.

One addition to previous post, I think the early days of Bruce owning that guitar, the pups were much more based on a vintage design. Then Phil started getting more experimental.

According to his guitar Tech Kevin Buell, he also used Fenders in the 70's and Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounds in the early 90's. I have SD QP's in my two Springsteen clones. Both neck and bridge register 16k+. Had to install a 500k Tone pot to contain the horsepower.

I was ready to buy a pair of Petillos, but David said Bruce bought all the magnets. :(

I've been researching the ol' Esquire for over 20 years, collecting every tidbit of info on the guitar as I could and from that research, I've concluded that the SD's are as close as you can get to the Petillos.